Shearing

so we had a phone call from neighbours - they were shearing their 70 sheep this evening .  So went to help out -  even if it was just handing round cups of tea.

First task is to construct a race to get the sheep from the pen to the shearer and  somewhere  convenient for  the helpers to  wait for things to happen

Meanwhile  the sheep need to brought inside

 and then encouraged to enter the race

and then they get sheared

and then the fleece gets sorted and rolled

An hour or so so set everything up,   70 sheep took about 40 minutes to shear .
and then another hour  when we all had something to eat together afterwards

onion eaters

It happened in 2014

And again in 2015

And its happened again this year. Now the beds have got raised sides - approx 15 inches.

And only those onions nearest the side have been got at

 So I think its the geese.


lets see how they get on with this .

And then there were 6

One of the ducks went AWOL and then later reappeared with 7 ducklings.
And they have been growing , shepherded about  by their mother, who keeps a watchful eye on them.

But over the last few days we have only seen 6 ducklings, however much we count

We assumed it had either wandered off and got lost , perhaps like this one , or it had been got by an otter because they do have a track record , or perhaps the hooded crows had taken it (but we thought they are getting a bit big for that ) . 

But we found some evidence in the field , a short distance from the Burn.

Its a duckling-sized leg. We had a look and couldn't  find any more bits of duckling. And this has been picked clean. So whatever took the duckling in the first place  left the carcass and this  scavengers - probably hooded crows - have cleaned up afterwards and dropped it in the field. 

If we loose another one in a similar way , we'll have to do something about penning them in until they are a bit bigger. 

A hen gone AWOL

One of the ducks when AWOL and reappeared with 7 ducklings 
One of the bantam  hens has gone AWOL , and was found. But she was sitting ( or trying to sit ) on 20 bantam eggs. And they are unlikely to be fertile as  we dont have a male bantam , following the sad demise of Andrew .

So we removed the bantam eggs and  replaced them with some hopefully fertile light sussex eggs. If she spotted the swap, it didnt bother her too much as she just sat on the new eggs.


If you look closely

You can see the hen